Dating Dead Men (6 page)

“No, you can't. There's only one of you. How many six-foot blondes—”

“Five eleven and seven-eighths,” I said. If I slouched. He had a point, though. Already he was a far cry, visually, from the doctor in the scrub suit. It wasn't just the tuxedo; he had a chameleon quality that I lacked.

The Alfa Romeo passed under lights again, showing two passengers, of indeterminate age and gender. “Good,” Doc said. “Come on, come on . . . Let's see your license number.”

Let's not, I thought. I did not enjoy hide-and-seek with sinister sports cars. My intrepid friend Joey would consider this a good time, but not me. And what would we do with a license? Call the police, report slow driving?

The Alfa Romeo made a sharp right and I let out a breath. The thought of police led me back to my brother. P.B. would be okay without me; he had his aluminum foil, more vital to his peace of mind than my presence. I just had to figure out how to keep him away from the murder investigation. Maybe I could arrange for him to visit Uncle Theo for a few days and—

The Alfa Romeo stopped. Five parking spaces away from the Rabbit.

“What are they doing?” I whispered.

“Wondering where we are. My guess is, they were too far away to see you run me over, but they recognize your car. I lost them for a minute on the exit ramp, then they got lucky.”

My poor, defenseless Rabbit. “For the record,” I said, “rather than ‘spring' someone from Rio Pescado, you might try going through channels; the staff is surprisingly human. But say you do it your way: What then? Wait for the getaway bus? Hide in the woods, live on leaves? If you're determined to break the law, you really will need my car.”

“You're right,” he said, surprising me. “But that will require some doing.”

“Like most things in life.” A dark suspicion crossed my mind. “Only it's not my turn to create a diversion.”

He turned the full force of his dimples on me. “But you do it so well.”

chapter seven

E
ight minutes later, I walked to the Rabbit with as much naturalness as I could muster, sensing the scrutiny of three men. That one of them was Doc did not help. I felt I was on a high wire without a net, a sensation furthered by the fact I was shoeless; I'd given Doc my Converse All Stars.

What would Ruta do, in my socks? “Pretend it's wartime,” she said. “Only they don't know what side you're on yet, so they're not going to shoot you.” I wasn't sure about the analogy, but it didn't seem that my death was in anyone's best interest.

Careful not to look at the Alfa Romeo, I got into my car and reparked it properly, despite shaking limbs. From the hatchback I grabbed a large piece of cardboard in the shape of sunglasses, which I positioned on the Rabbit's dashboard, as though the sun were overhead rather than across the world, shining down on Europe. I made a show of checking door handles, and prayed the Alfa Romeo was too far away to see that the driver's side was in fact left open.

My key was under the front seat.

I clutched my purse and turned toward Kinko's. A voice stopped me.

“Who's sorry now?” sang a gravelly soprano. The high-heeled woman wobbled out from behind a set of blue Dumpsters. I speeded up, but she wobbled faster, serenading me. Catching up, she offered her Vons bag. I waved her off.

This could mess things up. The Alfa men were supposed to think I would lead them to Doc—they'd seen us, presumably, in the Donut Stop, they knew we were a team. If it looked like I was hanging with this woman, would it confuse things? Would any of this work? How fast could a heart beat before it exploded?

I reached the steps to Kinko's, the singer right with me, continuing her way through “Who's Sorry Now,” a version of the song that contained just those three words. I climbed a step. Then another. Behind us, a car door slammed.

The Alfa Romeo.

I hesitated, waiting for the sound of the other door. It didn't come. Was only one man getting out of the car? This complicated everything.

“Corn chips?” The singer held out the Vons bag again. It must have been an instrumental break in her song. I shook my head and plunged into Kinko's.

The copy shop was warm and blindingly bright and blessed with human beings, one at a computer terminal, two working the printing machines. They looked up at our traveling lounge act. I strode down the aisle toward the front of the store, picking up speed until I reached the glass door, then turned to the chanteuse. “Stay. Do not follow. Sing to these people, they need a song.”

She turned to check them out. At the back of the shop, someone opened the door we'd just come through—one or both of the Alfa Romeo men. I didn't wait around for a good look; I hurried outside, onto Ventura Boulevard.

A gym bag sat against the brick building, inconspicuous unless you were right on top of it, at which point you might notice it bulge and move, as if it were about to give birth. I grabbed it and ran into the street, to the taxi summoned by Doc with his cell phone.

         

I
PAID WITH
a credit card and, as Doc suggested, had the taxi drop me off a block early. I'd spent the entire ride staring out the back window, so this was probably unnecessary, but I wasn't taking chances. There was always the possibility my pursuer had cleverly attached himself to the taxi's trunk and ridden there undetected.

Activity on Sunset was minimal. Even street people had retired into doorways with their blankets or furniture pads or newspapers as defense against the cold March air. I knelt down and unzipped the gym bag.

Margaret regarded me with a dubious expression. She had little button eyes that looked like she'd rimmed them with eyeliner, and pink ears, a pink nose, and pink toenails. A real girl. I offered her my hand, in case she was trained to shake, the way dogs are. She took my finger in her tiny teeth and shook it like she was bringing down big game. Doc had said she didn't bite; I guess that didn't count as biting. “Be nice,” I said, and set her on the sidewalk. “I'm new at this.”

She was intriguing to look at, I had to admit. Her movements were sensuous, like a belly dancer's, with a back-and-forth sway. The torso was long, relative to her legs, a dachshund's body. With a fluffy tail. Her head sloped into her back like a sports car, and the lack of neck dictated the need for the harness that attached to the leash; a collar alone wouldn't have anything to hold on to. It was impossible to look at her without wanting to draw her, and a greeting card began to unfold in my head: Margaret in combat fatigues, holding a machine gun, saying, “Don't call me rodent.”

I let her walk, since she'd been cooped up all night in pockets, cars, and gym bags. We made our slow way east, the sidewalk tough and pebbly under my wool socks. I didn't regret giving my shoes to Doc—he'd need them more than I did—but it was depressing to know his feet were smaller than mine.

I kept looking behind me.

When I reached my block and a patch of grass in front of Loo Fong's, I stopped. Doc had said Margaret was housebroken but I wasn't sure how that worked. I needed to pee again, so she might too, but how to communicate this?

“Pee, Margaret,” I said. She looked at me and yawned.

I explained that this was the best bathroom for her on the block, the block that was her new, temporary home. “See,” I pointed, “we live at Wildwood Arms Deluxe Apartments two doors down that way, and we work at the mini-mall right here, and there's a courtyard in between, I'll show you that tomorrow, but right now this is the optimum stretch of grass for bodily functions. Truly. Please.”

Incredibly, Margaret started sniffing the grass, perhaps hearing the call of nature. She turned her back on me and I looked away, to give her privacy.

I stretched to see around Loo Fong's neon CHINESE! Good! Fast! Cheap! sign, and almost lost my balance. There, nestled in the corner position between Plucky Chicken and Neat Nails Plus was Wollie's Welcome! Greetings.

Visible through the curtains, there was light.

When I'd left for Rio Pescado the shop had been dark.

         

D
ID
I
HAVE
to check it out? “Yes,” said the voice in my head. Ruta again. “But not in socks.”

Inside my apartment, I turned on all the lights, cranked up the heat, and tried to focus. The shop was locked when I'd left for the hospital; I might be nonchalant about the Rabbit, but I would no more leave my shop unsecured than a mother would send her child to school naked. The mini-mall parking lot was empty now, which meant that whoever was in the shop was on foot or didn't want their car seen. Something stirred in me, some primal homesteader-on-the-frontier impulse that gets people to load up their shotguns. Not that I had a shotgun.

The ferret crawled into the cupboard under the kitchen sink to commune with Mr. Clean. I fished her out and tied her leash to the refrigerator handle. The apartment grew warmer, but it would be hours before my extremities thawed. I donned a dry pair of socks, then hiking boots, sitting on the black-and-white checkerboard kitchen floor to lace feverishly. “Margaret, I've got to go out,” I said. “Believe me, I don't want to, but I've pumped my life's blood, not to mention my life savings, into that shop.”

Margaret crept under the oven. I pulled her out and shortened the leash.

“I don't expect you to understand feeling this way about a store, you're not a small business owner, but maybe you feel strongly about something—ferreting, say. If you take ferreting, and imagine four walls around it, that's my store. Maybe you find it gimmicky, the whole Welcome! Willkommen! Tyrolean village thing, but it works, these stores sell cards. Well, not my branch, not in record numbers, but that's changing. Too many people need me to stay in business. Fredreeq. My brother. Vendors.”

Margaret wrinkled her nose, then turned her back on me. I stood.

“I can't call the cops in case there's one of those APB things out on me, so I'm on my own.” I paused. Doc hadn't said what she ate. I poured Wheat Chex into a ceramic bowl, and showed it to her. She couldn't have cared less. I added milk. “Okay, here's food. And a paper slipper, to remind you of Doc. Gomez. Your human.”

Margaret studied the cottage cheese ceiling.

“All right, I'm leaving. Good luck to both of us.” I stashed the gym bag on top of the refrigerator and started scouting around for a blunt instrument.

         

M
Y HIKING BOOTS
squeaked on the linoleum stairs outside my apartment. I was armed with a marble bust of Dante and a can of Raid. In my jacket pocket was a cordless phone. All the better household items—police flashlight, hammer, carving knife—were in the shop. I didn't own a gun (number eleven, No Guns), nor did my life include ice picks, tire irons, hatchets, shovels, pitchforks, electric drills, or bowling balls.

Was I overreacting? Several people had keys to the shop. Of course, all those people had cars, too, except for Uncle Theo, who didn't drive. In any case, it was hard to imagine circumstances that would lure Uncle Theo here from Glendale at 4
A
.
M
.

But if it was intruders, it would be my second criminal episode tonight—me, who'd never before seen anything worse than illegal U-turns. Still, vandalism ran rampant in L.A. I thought of the Hummels, tiny porcelain Bavarian children, so fragile . . . the shop was insured, but Welcome! policy required managers to pay the deductible, which—

In apartment 1A, a dog barked. I hurried out the back exit, into the courtyard that connected the Wildwood Arms Deluxe Apartments to the rear of the mini-mall.

The cold hit me anew. The courtyard was too dark to make out anything but the scraggly citrus trees. I moved slowly and stepped on something squishy, probably a rotten lemon. I stopped.

My plan had been to go through the courtyard to sneak into the back room of my shop. But then what? Hit the intruders? I couldn't hit a golf ball with conviction. My best bet was to scare them off, but I'm not visually intimidating, despite being tall. I backed up into the shadows of the Wildwood Arms, as close as possible to my own apartment, one story up, so my cordless phone would still get reception, then dialed the shop. I waited through my outgoing message, then put on the most vicious voice I could muster. “I know you're in there, whoever you—”

There was a wail from apartment 1B. I'd managed to scare the Tomlinson baby. Next it would be Mrs. Albertini in 2B, who called the police as a hobby—yes, there was her light popping on. In a minute her curlered head would appear in the second-story window, a truly scary prospect. I whispered into the phone, “I'm coming with
cops
. So you better
get out,
” then raced back through the apartment building and out to the alley.

Gravel crunched underfoot as I stumbled ahead. My new plan was to sneak to the front of the mini-mall and see if I'd flushed out someone, without actually confronting them. The alley was dark and gave me the creeps, and I fervently hoped the dead cat carcass from earlier in the week was gone. I remembered how Ruta felt about alleys: the urban equivalent of dark forests, a place little girls should never go into at night. Of course, I was no longer a little girl. After tonight I'd be lucky to pass for middle-aged.

Near the shop's freight entrance I encountered a car. Joey's.

At least, it looked like her car, an old silver Saab. I moved in for a closer look. The map light was on, illuminating a copy of
Vanity Fair
and an empty frozen yogurt container on the front seat. Yes, Joey's car.

That light shouldn't stay on, or she'd run down her battery. I tried the door.

The car alarm blared. Behind me, the freight door opened. Someone grabbed me. I screamed.

         

B
EING HUGGED BY
my friend Joey was like being hugged by an ironing board, Joey being five foot ten, all angles. I let myself be fussed over as I shivered in the alley, relieved yet enraged, probably headed for a breakdown, now that the crisis was over.

“You're freezing,” Joey said. She was pale and lovely, with wild hair the color of an Irish setter. “You're shaking like you have palsy. What are you doing?”

“What am I doing? What are you doing? Why didn't you park out front like a normal person?”

Joey herded me into the back room, illuminated by candles. “I brought over the chaise longue,” she said, “so I had to use the freight entrance.”

The back room was Joey's home away from home, in part because it housed so much of her furniture. She spent the night often when her husband was out of town, occasionally when he was in town, or whenever she felt the need to, as she put it, run away and join the circus.

“How come you didn't pick up the phone a minute ago?” I asked.

Joey led me to the red velvet sofa that had once been hers, now folded out into a bed and made up with sheets and pillows. “I unplugged it back here,” she said, covering me with a quilt. “Someone's been calling every half hour.”

“What? Who?” I shot up, shedding the quilt.

“I don't know who, they hang up when I answer. God, you're jumpy. Look, I've got the space heater going and tea, so why don't you just sit down and warm up?”

I sat, watching her cowboy boots clomp across the room to my drafting table, where steam rose from an electric teakettle. She wore paisley pajamas with her boots, a look I found oddly comforting. She made tea, the steam distorting her profile, fogging up her John Lennon glasses. Joey had a nearly flawless face, made interesting by a scar in the shape of a crescent moon running from cheekbone to jaw line, dead white against her ivory skin. Sometimes she covered it with makeup. Mostly, she didn't bother.

“Do you think my brother is capable of killing someone?” I couldn't believe the words had come out of my mouth. I hadn't meant to talk about this. Forty seconds in front of the heater must've thawed it out of me.